saturday evening with all of them

The time: c. 11 pm Saturday 29 March
The place: my apartment
The actors: Plan C, me
The event: Plan C is crying.

And why is he crying?

Because D3 (one of my daughters) is ‘so beautiful.’

* * *

Have I mentioned that Plan C is very emotional? and sentimental?

Well, he is; especially late at night after significant consumption of wine.

* * *

He’d seen pictures of her before they met; they’re all over the place here. And he’d seen a DVD in which she appeared. So he already knew what she looked like.

But when she walked in Saturday night, she looked more beautiful than I’d seen her look in years. And a large part of her beauty derives from her complete lack of vanity, though she has been told many times, often by strangers, that she’s ‘pretty.’

And that was the first time Plan C set eyes on her.

* * *

DH, my other daughter, looked terrific that night too, but she arrived later, and Plan C was already under the spell of D3. And so when we arrived at the restaurant, it somehow happened – i.e. it was no accident – that Plan C seated himself next to D3. He conversed with her much of the evening, though in fact everyone talked with everyone, and my poor deaf mother tried to read lips and finally gave up. We did some translating for her, but not all the time.

* * *

This is the birthday dinner I’m describing, my birthday, the one anticipated in the previous post. And lest there be any confusion, let me say that I’m not suggesting anything ‘inappropriate’ on the part of Plan C.

What I want to convey, which I don’t think I ever have before, is how emotional he gets – how emotional he is – about family and about love.

* * *

In many ways Plan C’s very ‘ordinary’ – his word for himself – or at least conventional, certainly more conventional in some respects than any man I’ve dated. He works in ‘the business world’; he plays golf; he wears very stylish conservative clothes – striped or checked or solid-color shirts with collars, expensive shoes with tassels, polo shirts, golfing wind-breaker jackets, and that camel’s hair coat he wore on the first date. I was interested to note that one of his sons was wearing a camel’s hair coat – I don’t notice many 30-ish men in camel’s hair coats – and Plan C said proudly, ‘I bought it for him. I buy all their coats.’

So they’re a well-groomed family, dues-paying members of a synagogue (though Plan C does not attend services and is not observant), oriented, in their different ways, to the practical world. Plan C is also very patriotic, though still a lefty, and quite fond of family ceremonies: birthdays, marriage proposals, anniversaries of all sorts (e.g. the day he met his wife, our first email, our first phone call, our first date, our first night together, etc etc) are important to him.

He cried while watching the episode in the John Adams series in which Washington was inaugurated.

* * *

He and his sons aren’t like the men I’ve known most of my life, including many in my own family – scruffily-dressed atheist bohemians with wild hair and unpublished manuscripts stuffed in cardboard boxes.

* * *
But then in other ways, Plan C is not ordinary. I call him ‘nutty’ every now and then, and he insists that he’s not, that he’s ‘ordinary’, and that I’m the one who’s ‘nutty.’

I wouldn’t deny that; but he is too. He bites his finger-nails, serious biting that requires frequent bandaids. He eats in unexpected ways: he’s not a pig like Performer, who ate only rich, fattening, high-cholesterol, expensive foods, preferably paid for by someone else. No, Plan C eats a fairly normal-looking meal and would buy everything he eats if I didn’t often insist he was my guest some of the time. But he also nibbles, and certain foods disappear entirely when he is reminded of their presence: artichokes, chocolate, cashews, blackberries, hummus (I just discovered that Sunday morning – ‘I finished the hummus,’ he confessed, and that meant about two-thirds of a cup of it – yuck!), and the occasional bag of potato chips. He drinks wine, whiskey, beer, fake beer, and orange juice (without pulp). He likes ‘fluffy white rice,’ which I attempted (and failed) to produce last Friday night. I was out of practice. Putting it on the table, I said, ‘Here’s your gummy white rice.’ He was nice about it, because Plan C is not a foodie.

* * *

Maybe I think he’s nutty because of funny things he does without thinking, about which, when I point them out, he asks, Did I do that??? I guess I’m remembering the way he banged on the restaurant table on our first date. I can’t recall what point he was making that inspired the gesture, but I do remember that everyone in the restaurant turned to look (probably assuming we were fighting). Plan C’s back was to the other people, however, so he didn’t notice the stares. And when I mentioned it several dates later, he had no memory of it at all, and asked, Did I do that??

And where were we when he suddenly put his hands up, elbows pointed out, on either side of his chest, touching near his nipples, and said in what I remember as a fairly loud voice, I have breasts!!!

It couldn’t have been in a restaurant, could it? But I know it wasn’t in bed, because he had a shirt on at the time.

* * *
He blushes, of course, when I remind him of that last one by imitating it.

* * *

Well, whatever. It’s hard to describe other ways in which he’s ‘nutty,’ but maybe the fact that he cries a lot counts in that category; cries a lot, that is, for reasons some (more cynical people like myself) might term ‘sentimental.’ His younger son saw tears welling up in his eyes at the dinner a couple of weeks ago when his two sons and their girlfriends met me, and the six of us sat together for the first time ever around a round table in a restaurant.

Younger son warned him about the upcoming dinner when Plan C will meet his future daughter-in-law’s parents: Don’t cry were his orders.

* * *
So it’s very much family, I guess – things to do with his children, with my children, with his late wife – that make Plan C start crying and saying things that I believe and agree with but wouldn’t really articulate in that way myself, perhaps because I come from a family that tends toward the ironic and the witty and avoids bald emotional statements.

Crying Saturday night, after my mother and children had left, Plan C went on about my children, his children, and the grandchildren they would all produce, saying, ‘Those are the things that really matter, aren’t they?’

Yes, they are. And I can imagine tears upon first sight of a new grandchild, if I ever have one. Or maybe on first sight of a new baby of one of Plan C’s children.

But just thinking about the subject – mostly in the evenings, and this time after the consumption of quite a bit of wine, because my mother and one daughter only had a glass each of the wine I had at home and of the bottle at the restaurant, but two bottles got emptied – fills Plan C’s eyes with tears.

* * *

Late in the evening, when we had returned to my apartment and were eating birthday cake, one of my daughters asked me how Plan C and I had met. I had not said much to them about internet dating — they certainly don’t know I dated 33 men — but I made a snap decision not to lie about this.

‘J-date,’ I said.

‘J-date????????????’ they both responded.

They were astonished. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them so astonished. And my mother, seeing their reaction but not knowing what it was to, asked them what the question was, what the answer was, and what j-date was. I don’t know if she quite got it, but I bet they clued her in later, after they all left.

The astonishment derived from the fact that I was the least Jewish mother in the world. Our family celebrated Christmas ‘religiously’ — i.e. with a tree, with decorations that have been in my family for three generations, with carols sung without skipping stanzas, so that beautiful phrases like ‘Hail th’incarnate deity’ get uttered in our household, with presents, and with Christmas dinner, though not any particular ritual foods — and my children dyed eggs and had Easter baskets every year, growing up. I even delivered one to D3 this year. We did not belong to a synagogue; I don’t know Hebrew; I don’t know all the Jewish holidays; and I let them celebrate anything they wanted, including Jewish holidays once they found out about them. My ex’s mother sent them Hanukah presents, so we had Hanukah too, in a separate part of the room from the Christmas tree, when the two holidays overlapped. And when, in about 1999 or so, we began having Seders, we’d put the Easter eggs in the refrigerator for the duration.

So that’s why they were laughing hilariously about the fact that I had met Plan C on j-date.

They never asked why.

I would have told them, if they had asked, that Jewish men are (to my mind) funnier, wittier, smarter, and sexier.

But they didn’t ask.

* * *

Well, that’s how the evening went on one side, at least: Plan C ‘fell in love with’ my daughters, the idea of them, their existence, themselves, and – especially – one of them. They both gave him warm goodbye hugs, after this their first meeting. (It was my mother’s fourth or fifth time with Plan C, so of course they hugged.)

As we were all in the kitchen hugging and saying goodbyes, suddenly Plan C and both daughters burst out laughing. DH wouldn’t tell me what it was that had cracked them up, making it unclear whether she wasn’t telling because she was laughing too hard at the thought or (as I later came to believe) because she didn’t want to. But it had something, I could see, to do with saying goodnight to Plan C.

* * *

After they left I asked him, of course, and he tried to remember D3’s exact words. She had (it seems) begun a sentence uttered to Plan C with something like the following words: I usually don’t like — and then she had stopped abruptly, perhaps because she suddenly realized what she was saying and to whom.

* * *

I guess the unfinished thought was, I usually don’t like my mother’s boyfriends (or, the men my mother chooses??), but I like you.

* * *
If that’s what it was, that’s a bit odd, because the only boyfriend of mine she ever met was Performer. Yes indeed she didn’t like him one tiny bit, but one example doesn’t merit the adverb ‘usually.’ Now, if the operative noun, the one that didn’t get stated, was her mother’s ‘men,’ then that would include her father also. And that would be an even more interesting statement.

She didn’t finish the sentence, whatever it was; and possibly Plan C, who doesn’t have my ear for dialogue, didn’t remember it right.

But I guess it was something like that.

* * *
So either they all bonded, Plan C and my daughters, or he thinks they bonded, or he bonded with one of them, or under the influence of wine and proximity, they all temporarily bonded. Whatever it was, when, just before they left, he issued invitations to his Seder, they both accepted (as did my mother, who I don’t think quite heard all the details but got the drift of what was being asked).

* * *

It remains to be seen what actually transpires. Plan C was concerned because as of Sunday evening, twenty-four hours after we had parted, neither one of them had emailed me, though I had sent messages thanking them for their presents. Consumed by curiosity (when DH finally wrote me about something else), I wrote back, did you like plan c? and she wrote back the single sentence, yes! he seems great.

Uninformative in some respects, informative in others.

He’s going to email them on his own Tuesday to reiterate the invitation. So we’ll see. I’m both sceptical and hopeful. I want them to be there – at the Seder at his house – but I’ll believe it when I see it.

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